


Equations

by southspinner



Series: Oblivion [2]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - College/University, Author Levi, Cancer, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, I thought I was done with Oblivionverse but then, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Multi, Substance Abuse, mathematician Petra, tattoo artist Erwin, you can read this independently of Oblivion if you want
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-06
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-12 01:35:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2090907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the best-selling author of <em>The Infinity Vault</em> comes a long-awaited memoir, detailing a story of love and loss, of learning who you are, and of realizing that you are nothing until you're someone's something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

_"The human condition is that we are all supernova souls, burning out from the day of our inception and searing our way into the skies of the people around us."_

__ Jean Kirschtein, 'Oblivion'_

There’s nothing that really makes a memoir anything special. For the most part, they are self-indulgent things written by famous people to further stroke their own egos. Every human has a story, and to assume that your own story is worth telling and worth reading above anyone else’s is probably the biggest load of arrogant bullshit since Julius Caesar deciding that the calendar needed a month named after him.

Of course, I say this as I sit down to start writing my own memoir, so any condemnation of the genre I could expand upon would be a little hypocritical.

But this is not a memoir in its truest sense. I know that my story is nothing special. I know that in the long run, it is not as worthy of being seen as the stories of so many people I’ve had the privilege to know, so many people that I’ve had the privilege to love. This is their story. I’m just the one telling it.

However, anyone who’s sat through an entry-level Creative Writing class has learned about something called _exposition_ , and it’s because of this hateful little necessity of a well-crafted story that I’m going to have to waste your precious time, dear reader, with lots of meaningless little things about who I was before I mattered.

And before you start in with a train of thought about human value and special snowflakes, rest assured that there was indeed a time when I didn’t matter. There was a time when you didn’t matter. There is a time when all of us don’t matter. In the grand scheme of existence on this little rock hurling around a star at 67,108 miles per hour, you are a speck of dust. You are insignificant in the universe, and a truth that needs to become generally accepted is that you are nothing until you are someone’s something.

Arguably, I was someone’s something from the moment I was born, but all those titles were shallow and always stuck to my skin wrong. I was my mother’s son for about four months before the postpartum depression sent a whole bottle of Valium down her throat. I was my father’s project for nineteen years after that. I won’t sit here and whine about how awful it was to be born into the one percent, the only child of a Fortune 500 CEO, my last name a household one that turned heads. I have never been broke. I’ve never wondered where my next meal was coming from. But with the bottom levels of my Maslow’s Hierarchy consistently fulfilled, the upper ones suffered.

Absolutely no one will be surprised to hear that I was a weird kid, never smiling at the right time or saying the right thing. That’s a social faux pas for normal people, a disaster for people in the spotlight. So after enough years of being berated for not being _normal, goddammit,_ I just stopped talking completely. After enough research on the causes and effects of social anxiety years later, I was finally able to accept that it wasn’t my fault. Most of this book takes place before then. Another thing that anyone who's sat through an entry-level Creative Writing class will know about is something called an  _unreliable narrator,_ and for that, I apologize. I can only tell this story the way I saw it, and I saw it through the eyes of a broken boy who was so, so frightened of his own happiness.

You are nothing until you are someone’s something, and that’s why my life before my sophomore year of college doesn’t matter. This is the story of the people who made me something. An author. A friend. A lover. A father.

And I can only hope that I do them justice.


	2. Heatstroke

_“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”_

__Kurt Vonnegut_

 

New York City was not designed with people like me in mind.

It’s close and cramped and soulless; being on street level is suffocating but being locked up in a little box hundreds of feet above the ground is almost as bad. Everything is noisy and brash, no time given for reflection or getting your bearings. And then there’s the reality of it being necessary to use public transport to get anywhere and the inevitability of talking to strangers if you want to set foot outside on any given day. New York City is an acquired taste, one that I’ve come to at least appreciate now as I sit and look out my window onto the muted bustle seven stories below my bedroom window.

When I was nineteen, there was almost nothing in the world that I hated more.

This, of course, is probably leading you, dear reader, to ask a perfectly valid question. _But Levi, if you hated The Big Apple so much, why did you go to college at NYU?_ The answer being, ‘I didn’t have a fucking choice.’

The dynamics behind my decisions concerning higher education were complicated, to say the least. There are plenty of small colleges out there; plenty of them in New York, even. Being unable to function like a normal human being made going out of state for school a laughable idea, at least in my father’s opinion. If he’d had his way, I would have stayed at home, gone to the University of Rochester, cranked out a Business degree and started right to work in the good old family business.

But then again, if he’d had his way, I wouldn’t have sat across the dining room table from him when I was sixteen, raising an eyebrow when he mentioned the path he’d laid for me and snorting out, “Yeah, no, fuck that. I want to be a writer.”

That went over like a lead balloon, of course, and the two of us spent the remainder of my high school career at each other’s throats about my future or lack thereof. The final result was that Dad refused to put his money into me getting “some bullshit degree that won’t get you anywhere,” I refused to give a shit about whether or not I got a dime from him, and the combination of these two facts and me being reasonably intelligent resulted in a 35 on my ACT born of pure concentrated spite. A few more essays, a handful of scholarship applications, and I was in at NYU for an English degree with only the tasks of paying my room and board and keeping my GPA up enough to maintain my scholarship to worry about.

Paying for housing meant getting a job, which came with its own set of demons, but I was able to bite back the uneasiness prickling across my skin long enough to talk my way into thirty hours a week stocking shelves and sweeping floors in this old used book store about a mile off campus. I got to be around books, I wasn’t technically required to talk to people, and the owner was a sweet older lady who constantly tried to feed me whenever I walked through the door. It wasn’t a raw deal. Tack my paycheck on to signing my soul away in student loans, and I was able to snag a single room in one of the oldest dorms my freshman year, managed to exist for two semesters on coffee and ramen and about two hours of sleep a night.

I fucking loved it.

I loved being an English major, I loved going to classes I actually gave a shit about, and I loved writing. I’d always loved writing. It was one foolproof way to make myself understood in an existence where the prospect of speaking more than three words to someone sent me into a spiraling panic. I was good at it. Even my professors said so, the first praise I’d ever gotten, and I soaked it up like a self-centered little sponge, smirking my way through all my entry-level classes and making sure to end every mandatory phone call home with the reassurance that I was doing just fine, Dad, one might even say thriving.

Which, of course, was a bold-faced lie.

Even though I loved what I was going to school for, the actual ‘going to school’ part was a little harder to deal with. For every reassurance I sent home that I was doing fine, there was a shaking, gasping meltdown in the middle of my dorm room floor. For every glowing review I got on a paper, there was a day where I didn’t eat two meals because the prospect of having to talk to the people working in the dining hall didn’t seem worth it. For all of my determination to get out of Rochester and do what I wanted, I got continually slapped in the face with the fact that I couldn’t operate normally. Dad always told me that it was because crazy ran in my mother’s side of the family and that I must have picked it up from her, my instability her parting gift to me before she decided that her sadness was worth more than her son. Maybe that was true, and maybe it wasn’t, but the fact remained that I was unable to plug into the human condition the way I should have. They don’t typically make AC adapters for people.

That’s where Erwin Smith comes in.

I met Erwin at freshman orientation, remembered him both because he was ridiculously tall - but when you stand at an impressively tiny five-foot-three, everyone is ridiculously tall - and blocked my view of the stage in the auditorium, and because he already had a group of new friends surrounding him by the time we left. He was one of those magnetic people I’d never understood, had a way of making you want to listen to him. We ended up lab partners in Bio 101, both of us fulfilling gen-ed credits with gritted teeth and a sense of disenchantment. He was a Graphic Design major, I later found out after looking at his lab notebook and finding it full of doodles instead of data, but he was planning on putting himself through college by working part-time as a tattoo artist, even had an apprenticeship at one of the better shops in town.

I should take this opportunity to mention that I was confused to hear this because the first time I met him, I’m pretty sure Erwin was wearing a polo shirt and khakis. He was the definition of squeaky-clean, a sincere demeanor and clothes that were always in style and a painstakingly maintained head of blonde hair that had probably never seen a drop of dye. He didn’t have a single tattoo. When I mentioned it, he said it would ruin his prospects as a serious graphic designer in the future. I decided that he was weird as hell, but that I didn’t really give a damn about him as long as he did his share of work in lab.

Two months later, he was the best friend I’d ever had, and I hated him a little for it.

Existing in New York City on a college student’s stress level still wasn’t easy, but I’d at least found my AC adapter. Erwin and I were an unlikely duo, but we worked, despite all my bitching and moroseness and all his annoying extroversion and more than a healthy dose of self-importance. I got slowly pulled into his ever-expanding network of friends, kicking and screaming the whole way, although I eventually settled in with a few of them. Mike Zacharias, a kid I’d gone to high school with ended up at some mutual friend’s party, we both got drunk, there was a guitar involved, and by the time I stumbled home I was in a garage band. Practice every Tuesday night. Writing songs was good practice for my poetry classes, anyway.

My freshman year was, in a word, interesting. But it’s not where this story starts. This story doesn’t start with Erwin running up to me during finals week and mentioning that living in an apartment was cheaper than student housing and okay, look, I already signed a lease on this place and my _asshole_ friend dropped out on me, please, man, I’m a good roommate, I swear. It doesn’t start with me shrugging and making him agree to not have any parties there or bring people over without giving me fair warning. It doesn’t even start with a hellish summer back in Rochester culminating with me hauling most of my worldly possessions into an outdated two-bedroom apartment in East Village.

It starts with Erwin Smith lifting me bodily out of my bed and dumping me on the floor at six-thirty in the morning.

“What the _fuck_ ,” I groaned, rolling over in the tangle of blankets wrapped around me and cracking one eye open. Erwin was already dressed and ready for the day, looking down at me and sipping a cup of coffee in his stupid polo shirt like a goddamned Aryan Abercrombie model.

“Your alarm went off thirty minutes ago. You turned it off,” he shrugged.

“Go away.”

“Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty. New semester! Exciting stuff!” I sat there in my convoluted mess of an Ikea comforter and glared daggers at him until he snorted into his coffee cup and extended a hand in my direction. “You always this cheery in the morning?”

“I’m this cheery all the goddamn time,” I grumbled, reaching up to grab his hand and hauling myself to my feet. My room was still a mess of half-emptied cardboard boxes, books and clothes spilling over the edges. I’d passed out before I could finish unpacking, but now that I was awake the disarray made my skin crawl. Pursing my lips, I went about making my bed, tucking the sheets into place and draping my comforter back where it was supposed to be. I mumbled a vague to-do list under my breath and started grabbing for boxes, mentally cataloguing what I hadn’t unpacked yet.

“Levi, you’ve got class in an hour and a half,” Erwin said.

“What?” I said.

“The schedule you put on the fridge is right, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing over his shoulder and down the short hallway into the kitchen. “Calc? 8AM in Weaver?”

I blinked slowly, still trying to wake up enough to process it.

“And you said you’d rather walk than take the subway, so…”

It clicked. _“Shit!”_

I shoved Erwin out of the way and went running back the hall, shedding articles of clothing as I went and standing in the shower for a good two minutes before I realized that I was still wearing my socks. The shower in our apartment was terrible; it had next to no water pressure and the temperature had a habit of alternating between scalding and freezing. I gritted my teeth and got through it as quickly as possible, running back up the hall with a towel around my waist and a toothbrush sticking out of my mouth.

Erwin was sitting on the kitchen counter with his coffee, looking amused. “In a hurry?”

“Hetchoo aff ah dur cower.”

“Hm?”

I turned around and spat my toothpaste out into the kitchen sink, turning the tap on to rinse it as I glowered over at him. “I said, get your ass off the counter. I prepare food there.”

He rolled his eyes but still humored me, hopping down onto the floor and wandering over to the rickety table that had come with the apartment. “Demanding. I should’ve put a clause in the roommate agreement that limits how fussy you can be.”

With a deadpan that would have sent chills down the spine of a normal person, I turned over to him and slowly raised an eyebrow. “There was no roommate agreement. There was only you begging me to come live with you since Nile moved in with his girlfriend.”

“Irrelevant. You’re still fussy. Go put clothes on before you catch pneumonia.”

“It’s August, you ass,” I snapped, stalking back to my room and shooting a “Do something useful and make me some coffee” over my shoulder before I slammed the door.

Already too rushed to care, I threw on some cocktail of clothing out of one of the boxes sitting around. Most of my wardrobe consisted of jeans and worn-out t-shirts under flannel shirts, anyway, so mixing and matching was easy enough. By the time I walked back into the kitchen, shouldering my backpack with one hand and trying to comb my hair into place with the other, Erwin had been decent enough to sit a chipped mug of coffee down on the table for me. His class schedule was stuck on the fridge next to mine, two more hours before he had to be anywhere, which gave him the option to sit there and smirk infuriatingly as I tripped over myself trying to get everything ready to go. “And here I thought you were so organized.”

“I _am_ organized,” I lashed back, throwing a Toaster Strudel in our rickety toaster while taking scalding gulps of coffee. “But it’s a little hard for me to run my well-established morning routine when I’m tripping over an ungodly mess of your shit, my shit, and the lazy-ass previous tenant’s shit. Give me a week to get everything unpacked and mornings around here will be a well-oiled machine, just you wait.”

“Just what I always wanted,” said Erwin, mimicking my flat expression. “A robotic living environment. Hey, what are you doing after you're done with classes today?”

“I work until ten. Why?”

“No reason,” he shrugged, finishing off his coffee and dropping the mug in the sink without rinsing it. I cringed. “Nile’s having a semester kickoff party; I figured that I’d at least--”

“No.”

“...At least extend the invitation.” Rolling his eyes, he flipped open his phone to check on something. “But why do I even bother?”

“I don’t do parties,” I mumbled, wondering why I felt bad for saying it. “Or people in general. You know that.”

“I know, I know,” Erwin waved me off, immersed in texting back whoever had just gotten ahold of him. “Get going before you’re late. Have a good first day.”

“Don’t come stumbling in here piss drunk at two in the morning and expect me to babysit you,” I warned him, walking out the door with my Toaster Strudel between my teeth as I jammed my headphones in my ears and turned my iPod up loudly enough to deter any passerby that might entertain the notion of trying to talk to me.

The walk to Weaver was excruciating in the late August heat, the barely-risen sun bouncing off the pavement, morning air heavy and humid. New York City holds on to heat like an insulator, and I’d been stupid enough to put on long sleeves. After a block, I was uncomfortably sweaty and had ripped off my outer shirt and tied it messily around my waist, cursing the heat and New York and my own stupidity for signing up for an 8AM in Weaver under my breath. Walking sucked, but it was my only option.

Or rather, it was the only option that didn’t result in my mental state being compromised. Technically, I had three options as far as transportation went. The subway - public transport and _filthy_ public transport at that; I could feel the panic licking across the backs of my teeth at the mere thought. Walking - sweaty and gross for the moment being, but as isolated as one could get in a big city when I had my headphones on and my eyes fixed on the ground. I had a car parked back at the apartment, a nice little black Audi that Dad had gotten me for my sixteenth birthday, but I hated driving it. Driving in general made me nervous, and traffic in the city was enough to send me into hyperventilation after about ten minutes. So Lola, as I’d affectionately dubbed her, sat in the parking garage beneath our building for the most part, untouched except for moving in, moving out, and when I got a mandatory summons back to Rochester for a weekend. In order, my potential set of results were panic attack, being sticky and disgusting when I got to class, panic attack.

I decided to suck it up and walk.

That ridiculously long description of my trip to my first class of sophomore year is necessary, dear reader, because it’s what an entry-level Creative Writing class will teach you is called an _allegory_. That walk to class was my entire life. A whole host of options, with only one or two vaguely unpleasant ones that didn’t result in me having a complete breakdown. Everything from my first family gatherings as a little kid all the way up through just getting through the day in high school was a roulette game of just how uncomfortable I could stand to be, picking my battles and losing them more often than not. Asking for help wasn’t an option. I’d tried that exactly one time, at age seventeen after spending an entire evening curled up on my bathroom floor trying to remember how to breathe, and I’d gotten shut down so fast that I immediately knew to never approach Dad about it again for fear of something worse than just dismissive scorn, which was bad enough as it was.

_You don’t need to go to the doctor, Levi. You’re not sick. The pills they make for that shit are placebos anyway. You’re being selfish. Think of the reflection on the family. Covering up the mess with your mother was hard enough, now you want to make everyone think you’re crazy too? Why can’t you just snap out of it and be normal? Selfish. Inconsiderate. Attention-seeking. Stupid, stupid, stupid--_

And so I walked in the proverbial hot-as-balls summer day of life, because it was better than lying down and never getting back up. I learned how to talk my way out of social engagements, learned to make it to class early so I could always get the seat closest to the door, learned how to walk with my head down and my headphones up so loud that my ears ached. After years of functioning in the barest sense of the word, I’d gotten used to my soul feeling sweat-sticky and not quite right. When you’ve never known normalcy, you learn to compensate for it.

Anyway. It was hot as fuck, Weaver was five blocks and a teeth-clenching dash across Broadway from my apartment on Avenue A, and I was generally disenchanted with the world. That’s the setting from which I viewed the day everything changed.

The air conditioning was at least running good and strong by the time I slumped through the front doors of Weaver, chilling the sheen of sweat clinging to my skin as I chucked my half-eaten excuse for breakfast in the garbage and wandered back the hallway to my right, making it about three steps before a spike of panic nailed me to the floor.

I didn’t remember my classroom number.

I had two options, only one of which was a real option. I could hunt around for the nearest professor-looking person and politely ask if they knew where 8AM Calculus was meeting. Yeah. No. I yanked my phone out of my pocket and flipped it open, calling up Erwin on speed dial and praying.

Two rings and a click. “Yes, dear?”

“I need you to tell me where my math class is,” I muttered tensely, wandering over into a corner and feeling the gazes of everyone who walked in through the door crawling around under my skin.

“It’s in Weaver,” Erwin replied, slowly, like he was talking to a toddler. Asshole.

“I’m _standing_ in Weaver, you buffoon,” I hissed, grip tightening on my phone until the thin little body of the Motorola Razr creaked in protest. “I need you to check the schedule on the fridge and tell me the room number.”

“Oh, that’s rough, I’m not in the apartment.”

“Oh _God_.” I felt like I was going to puke. Class started in five minutes.

“Hey, no, chill out! I’m right down the hall,” he hurriedly amended, apparently able to see the color draining from my face from several blocks away. “I was just wandering around meeting the new neighbors. Mr. Two Doors Down is hot as all hell and definitely gave me the once-over. I think I’m gonna like it here.”

 _“Erwin,”_ I groaned, looking at my watch and shifting nervously back and forth.

“Fine, fine, I’m going,” he sighed, a few seconds passing with the sound of a door opening and closing, his footsteps on linoleum. “Oh, you’re in the same place I was for math last semester. Room 212; take the front staircase, hang a right, it’s about halfway down the second floor hallway.”

“Thank you,” I sighed gratefully, leaning back against the wall and letting my eyes flutter shut for a moment. Crisis averted.

“You love me.”

“I sometimes find you tolerable. I might be inclined to do it more often if you’d grab my paycheck off the counter and deposit it before you go to Nile’s party tonight.”

“I think the people at the bank actually think I _am_ you,” Erwin laughed, pausing to apparently search for the aforementioned paycheck. “You haven’t been in there since you set up the account.”

“Just do it. Please.” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose as I flipped my phone shut and dashed up the stairs, making a sharp right and counting down through the numbers on the doors I passed. 212 was a large lecture hall rapidly filling with students at varying levels of consciousness, shuffling around each other and finding seats as eight o’clock ticked closer. I managed to snag the seat next to the door seconds before some half-awake kid in a freshman-issue NYU t-shirt did, setting up camp with my notebook before anyone could think of asking me to move. Across the hall and a few rows down from me, Mike stood up and waved. He’d texted me a few days before mentioning that we were in the same Calc section, but I hadn’t thought about it until I saw him. I rolled my eyes, the most acknowledgement of his presence he was going to get until we were no longer in a massive room full of people.

Eight o'clock came and went with no professor. The expectant silence in the room began to buzz, and after a few minutes, someone inevitably broke out the "if no one's here by 8:15 we get to leave" rule, which earned a peal of excited laughter from their audience, in the midst of which the back door clunked open loudly.

The young woman who nudged her way through the doorframe with an armload of binders and papers looked undeniably frazzled, laughing nervously as she hurried down the steps. The collar of her white blouse was turned up at a funny angle, tucked unevenly into a black pencil skirt that rode up a little as she jogged over to the table at the front of the hall and dropped her stuff. She was tiny, about my height, maybe even shorter, and built like a pixie. Everything about her was willowy and petite, narrow shoulders and lithe arms and little bird-boned wrists so delicate that it seemed a wonder to me that her armload of stuff hadn’t snapped them right off. The whole pixie aesthetic extended to her facial features, a sharp chin and high cheekbones and a cute little nose that turned up a bit at the tip.

The voice that came out of her didn’t match her, though, a big, attention-commanding soprano with a slight pull along the edges of her vowels. “Hey, guys, sorry I’m late, the copy machine decided to break down. But I’m here now, so let’s get down to business, yeah?”

She was actually very pretty, I noticed after a few more moments of watching her shuffle around with the disorganized pile on the table, one pale hand coming up to tuck a stray lock of soft-looking red hair behind her ear, most of it pulled into a messy updo that made it hard to tell how long it was. Fair enough. At least paying attention in class wouldn’t be hard. After a minute, she started working her way back up the stairs, passing out small piles of papers for the first person in each row to pass along. An unpleasant prickling sensation spiked at the back of my neck as she came closer, but she didn’t say anything to me directly, just handed me a small stack of copies of the syllabus with a small but sincere smile. Pretty eyes, too, I thought. Tawny. Sunlight through whiskey.

“Okay, so while the syllabus is going around, I’ll just introduce myself,” she spoke up from the back of the lecture hall, loud enough for everyone to hear as she hurried back down the stairs towards the whiteboard. She moved like a hummingbird, quick and darting and delicate, movements that extended to the squeaky brush of the dry-erase marker on the board spelling out a neat, angular P-E-T-R-A. “I’m Petra Ral, I’m a first-year math grad student, and I’m your TA. I double-majored in Mathematics and French for my undergrad right here at NYU, but I’m originally from a really, really tiny town in Alabama called Summerdale. Long story.”

Alabama. That explained the odd little inflections in her voice, although she didn’t really have an actual drawl. It was the speech pattern of someone who had spent a long time learning to speak in a different manner than their actual voice. I wondered what she would sound like if she weren’t speaking to a lecture hall full of students and immediately kicked myself mentally for it, since that train of thought implied me talking to her at all, which was right up there on the scale of likelihood along with pigs flying or Erwin being straight.

“All right, all my math majors in here, hands up!” Petra called out, and across the lecture hall a smattering of hands raised into the air, maybe ten percent of the students. She nodded and looked down at what I supposed was her roster, pulling a pencil out from where she’d shoved it through the loose knot of her hair and writing something down before looking around at all of us with a grin. “So that means the rest of you are in here for gen-ed requirements. Look, I get that math isn’t everyone’s favorite subject. A lot of people hate it because a lot of people aren’t good at it. But since this is Calculus and not College Algebra, I’m going to assume that you all have a decent grasp on mathematics. Maybe it’s just my inner nerd talking, but I think math is really cool. I’d like for you to come out of my class thinking that math is really cool as well, but I’ll understand if all you want to come out with is a passing grade. Either way, I’ll do my best to help you get whatever you want out of this semester. Office hours are on the syllabus, but you guys can text me or call me any time you have a question…”

My focus drifted as she started going over the syllabus, my lack of sleep from the previous night making my head fuzzy. I started writing in the margins of my notebook paper, stupid little snatches of prose that were floating across my brain, things about how a hummingbird’s heart beats over a thousand times per minute, fragile and fleeting, and yet they were proportionately one of the strongest animals on earth.

I didn’t tune back in until Petra started going down the roster, calling out the first few names and checking them off when someone raised their hand.

“Levi--”

“Yeah, I’m right here,” I cut her off before she could say my last name aloud, a precaution I’d learned to take after a few hellish first days of classes my freshman year. One utterance of anything beyond my first name and everyone’s head would whip around, gaping at me. That was the downfall of having everyone walk under a giant sign with your name on it every time they went shopping for clothes or home goods or whatever the fuck my family’s massive evil empire of a department store chain sold at the time. I had a massive attention magnet that immediately followed _Levi_ on all my class rosters and official documents, and I liked to avoid its effects at all costs.

“Oh, okay, hi!” To her credit, Petra seemed to pick up on the situation and take it in stride, giving me a little wave as she marked me off and continued down the list. The close shave with the roll call had me on-edge and feeling slightly sick, curled in on myself in the uncomfortable molded plastic chair and praying that she’d just take attendance and let us go early so I could find somewhere semi-private to regain my mental footing before I had to go out and push through the rest of the day. The pencil went back in Petra’s hair after a while longer, her hand darting over to grab another pile of papers. “Okay, so this is just a pre-test so we can see where your skill level is when it comes to the mathematical know-how that’s necessary for Calculus. It’s not graded, but do your best so we can get an accurate read, all right?”

Shit.

I picked at a stray thread in my jeans until I opened up a hole in the denim, fingers itching for a distraction as Petra wound her way back through the rows, passing out papers again.

(Okay. Okay, breathe. This is nothing you haven’t done before. You’re freaking out over nothing, stupid, stupid, don’t work yourself up. You got a fucking 35 on your fucking ACT, you can handle this bullshit. Breathe. Dammit, _breathe!_ )

My name was scrawled across the top of the paper reflexively before I even looked at it.

I stopped breathing.

It had been over a year since I’d done any math at all, and I might as well have been looking at a paper written in fucking Klingon.

I could feel spiderweb cracks of panic branching out rapidly over the surface of my mind, threatening to cave in with every uncertain little slash of my pencil across the paper - what was the difference between sine and cosine again? What the hell? Why did math need to involve letters anyway? I hadn’t really had any choice in what level of math I had to take for gen-ed. My ACT score along with the pretest I took before the start of my freshman year had placed me in Calculus, and so Calculus was what I had to pass to appease the College Gods. That seemed suddenly and soul-crushingly impossible. I made it through two questions of at least attempting to answer before I just sat and stared blankly at the paper, letters and numbers blurring together into an unintelligible mess.

Several minutes of tense silence passed, each one only adding to the feeling of me wanting to crawl out of my own skin. I couldn’t breathe, every single cell of me was a tensed tripwire, and I wasn’t all that confident in my ability to make it out of the public gaze before I crashed and burned. I waited for Mike to get up so I didn’t have to make the seemingly infinite trek to the front of the lecture hall alone, slamming my paper on the desk facedown and hurrying away before Petra could get a chance to look at it with me standing there. I didn’t wait for a dismissal. I didn’t pay attention to whatever it was Mike said as we worked our way back up the stairs. I headed straight for the door and made a fucking beeline out of Weaver, into the sweat and sun of the long walk back. Headphones in. Head down. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

I made the mistake of catching my reflection in a shop window on Avenue A, a sweaty, ghost-pale slip of a thing with stringy black hair plastered to his forehead and pupils almost swallowing irises from a fight-or-flight response that had never been required or even wanted. I paused for a second, looked at myself. If that was what everyone saw, someone who was a wreck before even an hour of the semester had passed, then it was no wonder that I’d earned my title as the Family Disappointment.

(No, you know what, on second thought, don’t breathe. Just hold it in and let it burn because it’s no more than what you deserve. Stupid. Selfish. Broken. Why can’t you just be _normal?_ )

There should have probably been some red flags involved in the knowledge that the voice of my anxiety sounded exactly like my father’s.

I managed to wait for five seconds to make sure the apartment was empty before I went down, knees cracking hard against the linoleum floor in the kitchen and ragged gasps for oxygen raking like claws up the inner linings of my lungs. I’d gotten so used to panic attacks that riding them out was almost second nature, a certain system to dealing with them that my body knew by heart. One minute, two minutes, slowly curling up on the floor, making myself as small as possible. Five minutes, hands twisted up too-tight in my own hair hoping that that pain would help ground me. Ten minutes, and oh God, they’re usually winding down by now, this is a bad one.

Twenty minutes. My whole body ached.

Thirty. I was absolutely and wholeheartedly convinced that this was how I would die, curled up on the kitchen floor in a shitty apartment, the victim of my own shortcomings.

Thirty-five. I was starting to _want_ to die.

My phone rang.

My hands were shaking almost too badly to flip it open, voice flat and as close to conversational as I ever got when I put held it to my ear. “Hello?”

“You were supposed to meet me at Sina’s for coffee after class, my darling little recluse,” Erwin sighed dramatically on the other end of the line, the ambient sounds of the aforementioned coffee shop in the background. “Mike is here. He won’t stop talking about how hot your TA apparently is.”

“Huh,” I replied, all I trusted myself with saying as I tried to wipe the disgusting mixture of sweat and tears off my face with my shirtsleeve. Still shaking. Still breathless. But functioning, because I had an audience now.

“Yeah, huh,” he snorted. “Where are you?”

“I, uh. I came back to the apartment. Headache.” I muttered, choking a little on the words and muffling the phone against my shoulder so I could rake in one labored breath.

“You okay?” Erwin’s voice was tinny and off-pitch from the muffled receiver, laced with skepticism.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” I said almost breezily as I pulled the phone back to my ear, free hand twisting up in my hair again. Just a few more seconds. “I’ll see you tonight. I’m fine.”

I hung up before he could push the issue any further, collapsing inward again for another unidentifiable stretch of time. I felt drained by the time I finally managed to drag myself to my feet, shaking and spent. Most of my food and cooking supplies were in the lower cabinets, both because of the fact that Erwin was too lazy to kneel down and dig through them and because I was too short to reach the overhead ones without standing on a chair. Behind a wall of brightly packaged ramen noodles and a forest of boxed dinners, there was a brown paper bag that I liked to call my emergency kit, consisting of a lighter, a pack of American Spirits, a half-empty bottle of Hennessy, and a box of Benadryl, which could knock me unconscious in about ten minutes if I took enough.

The pills weren’t an option, though; I had class again in three hours and a full shift at the bookstore after that. Instead, I settled for cracking the kitchen window and violating our lease by lighting a cigarette, letting the taste of nicotine and stale regret scrape roughly across my tongue before I yanked the cap off the Hennessy and took a shot’s worth straight out of the bottle. A few drinks later, I’d stopped shaking. The wonders of self-medication.

“I’m fine,” I whispered to myself, a futile attempt at reassurance that echoed in the empty apartment. “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.”

As fine as someone walking through a summer day with heatstroke could possibly be.

 


	3. Pattern

_“There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.”_

__Charles Bukowski_

There’s a sort of predictability in being a wreck. While you never know when the inevitable breakdown is going to come, you know that it’s out there waiting. So you plan your life accordingly. You organize your apartment down to the last fold of the last shirt stacked according to color in your dresser so you never have to freak out about losing something when you need it. You keep a painstakingly maintained schedule updated on a whiteboard magnetized to your fridge, yours in red and your roommate’s in blue, class and work, so you never have to panic when you come home after a decent day and he’s not there, so you know what to expect when you come home needing to break down and he is there, factor in the five extra seconds it takes to get to your room before you hit the floor. You plan out your day down to the second and make sure everything is tidy and neat and fits into the little box you’ve made for it so nothing can surprise you.

You function. You find a pattern that works, and you follow it. Tedium is better than chaos even if it means that you never have a shot at progress.

That pattern is the reason that there’s nothing worth writing about that happened in the week or so following my disaster of a first Calculus class. I functioned. I got up, went to class. Came home and broke out my emergency kit if Erwin wasn’t there, worked my way through the hours with conversation and subtly gritted teeth when he was. Went to work. Came home. Broke out my emergency kit again. Went to bed. Got up the next morning and did it again. The only thing to mark the passing of the days was the level of the cognac bottle in my emergency kit dwindling down to nothing but a few precious sips that I decided to save for a real emergency, given the fact that it was a rare commodity. Being nineteen, I couldn’t just pop on down to the liquor store. Hell, I’d have to be well and truly drunk to even consider talking to the person behind the counter, much less trying to smooth-talk my way into an underaged alcohol purchase.

On a Tuesday night in Mike’s garage in some moderately sketchy neighborhood in Queens, I walked over to where he was tuning his bass and slapped a fifty down on top of his amp. “I want a good-sized bottle of Crown Royal and whatever kind of sour mix you can get with what’s left.”

Mike was a senior, had graduated a couple of years ahead of me in high school, and more importantly had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday over the summer. Nobody else in our pathetic excuse for a band was legal yet, which left him as our default booze guy. No surprises there. I didn’t see Tuesdays as band practice night so much as I saw them as “get wasted for free” night. College students love their liquor, especially when it’s forbidden fruit.

Mike frowned, scratching at his scraggly blond scruff of a beard as he pocketed the money and looked down at me. “Crown’s pricey. Where’s my cut in this?”

“Your cut is that I sing for your shitty band, you asshole. Stop playing Al Capone and get me my goddamn whiskey,” I snapped, eyes narrowing as I practically flung the strap of my guitar over my shoulder and stalked over to my amp. There was some concoction of peach schnapps and vodka with a tiny splash of Redbull in a red solo cup that had been handed to me when I walked through the door sitting next to my guitar case, and I knocked half of it back with a disenchanted frown. It didn’t even burn.

“Someone’s a ball of sunshine today,” came a snicker from behind the drum kit set up in the corner.

“Shut the fuck up, Ian.”

I’d been on-edge since lunch. I usually ate at the apartment, but on the days when I didn’t have time between classes Erwin would snag me a sandwich or something on his way out of the dining hall and I’d find some corner of the library or secluded patch of grass in Washington Square to eat. But Erwin had picked up a last-minute tattoo consultation at the shop during my lunch hour, and I’d already skipped breakfast, which left me to handle the gut-wrenching horror of navigating the dining hall on my own. By the time I’d sat down with my food, the stress had stolen my appetite anyway.

It took finishing Mike’s stupid girly cocktail and a few more minutes of waiting time before the alcohol started wrapping warm tendrils around my frayed nerve endings, letting my tin-soldier limbs relax enough to flit fingers over buzzing guitar strings, spinning little riffs under the whispered snatches of lyrics I was reading off the pages of a beat-up notebook.

“Dude, are you okay?” Mike asked after a few minutes, squatting down until he was at eye-level with me and waving a hand in front of my face.

“Never better,” I said tightly, strumming the first few chords of the ‘Grand Theft Autumn’ cover we’d been working on. “Let’s play some fucking music.”

On Tuesday nights, you hover a little too conspicuously outside the liquor store, biting back the panic while your friend buys you enough self-prescribed medicine to hopefully last a week. The only thing that gets you through the cramped, sweaty, terrifying subway ride home is the reassuring sloshing in your backpack, the chain smoking that takes you from the station to the door of your building, the luxury of knowing that no one sees you shaking as soon as your bedroom door shuts behind you.

It’s part of the pattern.

* * *

The next morning, I rolled out of bed at six in the morning with a vaguely unpleasant hangover, shuffling into the kitchen and squinting almost confusedly at my surroundings.

“Party a little too hard last night?” Erwin asked from the table, drinking his coffee and watching me over the top of a newspaper, the headline something about the projected outcome of the 2004 election. A nineteen-year-old reading a fucking newspaper. What a tool.

“Since when have I ever partied?”  I mumbled, yanking open one of the bottom cabinets and getting out my coffee. Erwin drank this god-awful French Roast bullshit, and I prefered to actually taste the grounds if I was going to bother drinking coffee at all. Potential heart problems from consistent caffeine overdoses? Go big or go home. “Correction: since when have I ever partied without you there to show me how normal people party? It was Tuesday. I was at Mike’s.”

The corner of Erwin’s mouth twitched upwards. “Hm. Lucky.”

“It is too goddamned early for you to start in with your stupid crush on my bassist,” I groaned, jabbing arbitrarily at the coffee maker.

“Your bassist is hot,” he shrugged. “Any crush I have is perfectly justifiable.”

“Mike’s not even gay.”

“Levi, Levi, Levi.” Shaking his head and fixing me with a pedantic look, Erwin flipped a page of his newspaper with a flourish. “Anyone is gay if you try hard enough.”

“I’m not,” I said, standing on tiptoe to try and reach the shelf with the coffee mugs.

“You’re pretty gay with half a bottle of Cuervo in you,” he smirked, standing up to grab one for me.

“That was _one time!_ ”

“That’s what they all say,” Erwin said with an unflappable smile, sitting back down and taking a very calm sip of his coffee. “And besides, Mike’s supposed sexuality is of no concern to me given the fact that my record for turning straight boys is like… five-and-oh.”

“I’m done with this conversation,” I said flatly, shaking my head and heading for the bathroom.

“Your coffee!”

“ _Fuck_ my coffee!”

“That sounds uncomfortable. I’d prefer your bassist.”

I slammed the bathroom door so hard that Mrs. Upstairs stomped on her floor in protest.

By the time my Monday-Wednesday-Friday trek to Weaver was over, I was starting to regret skipping my morning caffeine. The weather was finally starting to cool down, but five blocks was still a long haul with a hangover and two hours of sleep. I slumped into my usual seat right next to the door, making a little nest with my arms on top of the desk and burying my head in it for the few precious minutes I had before Calc started and got my day off to a hellish start. It wasn’t that Petra was a bad teacher. She spoke clearly and simply, went at a good pace and always made sure to explain things in detail when someone raised their hand to ask a question. My problem was that I would never in a million years be able to call up the courage to raise my hand. I sat in my back-row seat and watched forlornly as key concepts flew right over my head. What had been vaguely intelligible equations during the second and third sessions of class were now starting to look like complete nonsense.

The thought of sitting through another hour of my grip on mathematics spiraling away made something in my chest squeeze, and I forced myself to take deep breaths into the small, humid space between my arms and the surface of my desk until Mike walked by and flicked the top of my head. I took a blind swipe at him and sat up, growling irritably, hoping that no one could hear the pulse hammering against the linings of my veins.

Petra walked in right at eight o’clock, balancing a Starbucks cup and a pile of papers almost as big as she was. One of the guys close to the front jumped up to help her, but she waved him off with a little smile and some murmured response that I couldn’t hear before she dropped her stuff on the front table and turned around to give us all a hurried wave. “Morning! Okay, you guys get to go early today because I have a meeting scheduled, but I’m going to try to finish up Monday’s lecture topic. So. Parabolas.”

I didn’t even bother trying to catch up, just sat there and selectively tuned out as she turned around and started writing down formulas on the board. It was the first time I’d ever seen her hair down, I realized, straight and a little messy where it brushed her shoulders. She had a habit of tucking it behind her ears as she talked, pausing every once in a while to look at an equation and scratch absently at the back of her head. I started writing in the margins of my notebook again, a short free-verse poem about the color red.

"...and after I call you down to get your pretest back, you can go. See you guys on Friday!"

I tuned in at precisely the wrong time, a sickly weight dropping down into my stomach. I'd almost forgotten about the pretest, had dealt with so many miniature meltdowns since the first day of class that those long minutes spent curled on my kitchen floor had nearly slipped my mind. But the remembrance of that panic took up residence again quickly enough, spread out under my skin, prickly and uncomfortable as Petra flipped through her stack of papers and called out names.

"Levi?"

Oh God. Oh God. There was no waiting for Mike to walk down, no possibility of using anyone else as my cover. Gritting my teeth, I got stiffly out of my seat and moved downstairs as fast as my half-paralyzed limbs would allow, eyes locked on the stairs, on the floor, on Petra's hand clutching a paper, slender fingers, powder blue nail polish.

On the red-inked number zero next to my name. On the scribbled little see me after class? written beside it.

Petra had mentioned having a meeting after class. I was her meeting. I shuffled back to my chair trying to fight the urge to throw up, pretended to be getting my stuff in order as everyone else filed out.

"Hey, are you coming to Sina's with Erwin and I for coffee?" Mike asked, infuriatingly unaware of the fact that I was a hair's breadth from snapping and him hanging around and trying to make me communicate wasn't helping in the slightest.

"Can't," I said tightly, the only thing I was capable of forcing out.

"Oh come on, you can't keep ditching us. Erwin's worried about you, man. So am I, if you want the tr-"

"Mike, I said I fucking _can't_." I interrupted him through gritted teeth, knuckles going white along the edge of my desk. Mike opened his mouth like he was about to say something and then apparently thought better of it, shaking his head and walking out the door.

The empty lecture hall felt like a tomb. I could almost hear my own funeral dirge playing as I walked down to the front with my backpack weighing on my shoulders along with a sense of impending dread. Petra was packing up her stuff into a smart little leather shoulder bag. I tried to say something. All that came out was a strangled croak. A death rattle.

She looked up at me fleetingly, a flash of what appeared to be honest concern flirting across her face before the expression dissolved into a bright smile, hands abandoning her work to reach forward and rest one on my forearm. "Don't look so scared, sweetie, you're not in trouble. I just wanted to talk."

Even though I knew that it would only make me look worse, I stiffened under the touch, teeth clenching tighter. I was not from a family of hugs or easily given affirmation. Physical affection was foreign to me. I wasn't sure of what I was supposed to do with it. Petra seemed to pick up on my discomfort, pulled away with an apologetic look while I choked out a tortured, nearly-unintelligible "Sorry. Bit of a nervous disposition."

"Say no more," she smiled, and I thought with a little spark of sarcasm that I'd be more than happy to follow that order, more than happy to turn tail and sprint out of the lecture hall. Instead, I just nodded, swallowing hard.

Despite how tense I was and how vehemently I didn't want to be in my current position, Petra had a very calming presence. She wasn’t demanding in her being, didn’t get up in your personal space and demand to be noticed. You noticed her because she had her own brand of soft magnetism that drew you in gently, made you pay attention before you realized you were doing it. I noticed this at the same time that I noticed that it was a little easier to breathe.

She stuffed the last of her papers into her bag and leaned back against the first row of desks, running a hand through her hair. “I understand where you’re coming from, though. I was terrified of my professors during my undergrad.”

“I’m not terrified of you,” I lied.

“Uh-huh.” She had a nice, musical laugh. Like bells. “Tell you what, I’ve got a meeting a few blocks over in a little bit, why don’t we head that way and talk over coffee? Maybe you won’t look at me like I’m about to bite your head off if I’m in a setting where I’m not an authority figure.”

“You sure you weren’t a psych major?” A healthy dose of snark, considering the fact that she was absolutely right. I calmed down significantly as soon as we were out of Weaver, although I was still jumpy, the loudness of traffic and closeness of people making my nerves hum. I only made it about a block before my hands itched for occupation and my brain itched for chemical calm, a hand rifling around in my backpack until I found a pack of cigarettes and lit one, taking drags that would make most people pass out and burning through half the smoke in thirty seconds flat. It wasn’t until I had a decent nicotine buzz going that I dared to look over at Petra, ice settling in my chest when I saw that she was frowning slightly. Sputtering, I took the cigarette out of my mouth and went to grind it out under my shoe. “Shit, uh, sorry. I, uh. Yeah.”

“Oh, what? No! You’re fine!” she rushed out almost as quickly as I had, waving her hand at me and shaking her head as a wry smile settled on her lips. “I was actually battling with the urge to ask you if I could bum one. I’ve been doing really well with cutting back, but after the morning I’ve had…”

“Say no more,” I said, mimicking her expression from back in the lecture hall as I handed her an American Spirit and held up traffic on the sidewalk long enough to stand there with my lighter as she leaned forward and let the flame kiss the tip of the paper cylinder, letting out a satisfied sigh as she took off up the street again.

“It’s a terrible habit,” Petra said offhandedly, the potential for the statement being preachy lost to the fact that she said it right before taking another drag. “I think a lot of people start during college. Helps with the stress.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. Yeah. Didn’t I fucking know it.

I didn’t really know where she was taking us, so I sort of slipped into a pace one step behind her as we worked our way through lower Manhattan, the blaring of car horns and another wave of anxiety flooding my head. I half-wished that we had just stayed in Weaver for the fact that our conversation would have been over by now, not drawn out into the open and stringing me along like a skittish puppy on a cigarette-smoke leash. It wasn’t until I saw the familiar, worn wooden doorstep of Sina’s Coffee Shop that I _really_ felt the terror kick in again. Breath catching in my throat, I looked frantically down at my watch. Ten ‘til nine. They were definitely still in there.

“You coming, Levi?” I had been right about her real speaking voice being different from the one she used in class. It was softer, sweeter, the accent more pronounced, syllables smooth and honeyed. My name came out like _Lee-vah_ , and for some reason it sounded better that way.

Fuck.

“Huh? Oh, uh. Yeah. Sorry.” I could actually feel the apprehension settling in my bones as I stepped through the door.

Sina’s was an old place that was exceedingly popular among pretentious NYU students who were more concerned with _looking_ like they went to music festivals and peace rallies than actually going to them, but despite the clientele they had a hell of a vanilla cappuccino. I was used to Erwin ordering for me on the days that I could actually be convinced to stop in with him and Mike between classes, handing him a few bucks once we were at a table to pay him back for me not having to tie myself in knots over a fucking cup of coffee. I didn’t have that luxury now, and combined with the fact that Erwin and Mike were probably still lurking around somewhere in the heavy-scented shadows, able to see me after I’d unquestionably ditched them, I was practically convulsing by the time I got up to the counter. Petra was looking contemplatively at a display case of scones, a small mercy that she didn’t have to see me choking on my order and slapping a ten dollar bill down on the counter, forget the change, just get me out of here, God, get me out of here.

We grabbed a table next to the window, and by the time we sat down I was starting to wish that I had something strong to dump in my coffee when no one was looking. Petra checked something on her phone and took a little bite of the muffin she’d ordered while I’d been having a panic attack over my damned cappuccino, only looking up at me after a long stretch of silence. “Okay, now that the situation’s a little more relaxed, we can talk.”

I almost laughed.

“So, what’s your major?”

“English,” I said guardedly, bracing myself for the inevitable patronizing look, the almost-imperceptible shake of the head, the _what are you going to do with that?_

“Oh wow, cool!” Petra said, nodding enthusiastically. “My roommate during freshman year was an English major. You guys do an insane amount of work.”

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what else to say. Nothing new there.

“So why are you taking Calc if you’re an English major?” she asked, stirring her tea and looking at me intently. Usually when people held eye contact with me for more than five seconds, I started to squirm. All I did looking at Petra was think again that she really did have pretty eyes. Brown shadow. Liquid liner with little, perfect wings.

I shrugged, looking away after telling myself that I probably seemed weird enough without staring at her. “It’s what I tested into.”

“You tested into a Calculus course geared for math and engineering students?”

“I got a thirty-five on my ACT,” I mumbled, feeling the scrutiny in the looks she was giving me start to burn.

Petra sat back in her seat, let out a low whistle. “How many times did you have to try for that?”

“One.”

“Jeeeeeesus.” Shaking her head slowly, she watched me over the rip of her styrofoam cup as she took a sip of tea. “I had to bust my butt and take it three times for a thirty-two by the skin of my teeth. You must be crazy smart.”

 _Not crazy smart, mostly just crazy,_ the retort collided with the backs of my teeth, but throwing my mental instability around wasn’t the best way to not call unwanted attention to myself. So instead I just grimaced and stared down into my drink. “Apparently not where Calculus is concerned.”

“Hey, don’t be down on yourself. You realize you’re literally in a room full of math and science majors, right? You don’t exactly have home-field advantage,” Petra replied with an almost painfully kind smile, the sort that people give to little kids with terminal illness or pound puppies they don’t have the time to adopt. I’d gotten very good over the years at spotting pity. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You know that the College of Math and Science has a tutoring program, right? A really cheap one. For five bucks an hour you can work with a grad student and they’ll help you out. I can give you the number--”

“No.” Too late, I realized how rude I probably sounded. In the case of most people I wouldn’t have given a shit, but being rude to Petra somehow felt like a higher level of assholery, one that even I couldn’t be content with. “I, uh. No thanks. I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yeah. I was just having an off day. I’m doing fine now.” Lies.

“I’m confident in my abilities. I’ll be fine for the test.” Lies. Lies.

“It’s easy enough.” Lies. Lies. Lies.

I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, so I looked over her shoulder, not making eye contact with anyone.

Until I made eye contact with Erwin as he walked toward the door munching on a blueberry muffin roughly the size of his head.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

“What?” Petra said.

“Nothing.”

Erwin did a double take, standing in the doorway with the muffin stopped halfway to his mouth, mouthing out _“Levi?”_

I glared at him with all the unadulterated hatred I could muster, shaking my head slowly.

He blinked a few times and then turned and said something to Mike, who’d just gotten a refill of his coffee. Now both of them were staring at me. Mike leaned over and whispered something to Erwin, whose eyes widened.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

He looked from Petra to me and mouthed something else, seemingly forgetting that I couldn’t read lips.

Petra was looking at her phone. I narrowed my eyes and mouthed back, _“What?”_

Erwin tried again. I shook my head. He sighed, handing the half-eaten muffin over to Mike before adding charades to his communication method, mouthing it again slowly, first pointing to his chest, and then very unceremoniously at his ass. _“Is that your TA?”_

I slapped a hand to my forehead and groaned.

Petra looked up from her phone, frowning slightly. “Are you okay, hon?”

“Yeah, fine,” I rushed out, turning the motion into a hand pulled quickly through my hair as I gave Erwin and Mike my most powerful lasers-from-the-eyes look of death. They were still standing in the doorway, whispering amongst themselves.

Erwin pointed at Petra, then at me, then started slowly pelvic thrusting while raising his eyebrows questioningly.

 _“No.”_ I mouthed emphatically, resisting the urge to slam my head against the table until I went unconscious.

The fucker gave me the most condescending look known to man, smirking infuriatingly as he took his muffin back from Mike and slowly took a bite. I reached one hand under the table and flipped him off. He smirked wider. I wondered how much momentum it would take for someone my size to clothesline someone his size over the counter. Maybe I should have paid more attention in Calculus, figured out the exact curve I’d have to jump at to successfully kick him in the teeth.

My violent thoughts were interrupted by Petra, who had put her phone away, getting up from her chair with a sigh. “I’d love to stay and talk, but I really do have a meeting. But hey, do me a favor and hand me your phone real quick.”

I frowned and dug my phone out of my pocket, handed it to her apprehensively. She stood with her back on one shoulder, hip cocked out against the table as she flipped it open and punched a flurry of buttons, handed it back to me with a bright grin. “There you go. The number on the syllabus is an office phone and no one ever picks up. If you ever change your mind about tutoring, drop me a text, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” I replied, feeling something heavy in the air, an ellipsis that needed filling in. “Uh… have fun at your meeting?”

“I’ll try. No promises,” she laughed, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “It was really nice to talk to you, Levi. You’re very interesting.”

“I’m really not,” I said, feeling vaguely horrified for some reason.

“You really are. I’ll see you on Friday, okay?” She walked out the door, and I watched her go, blinking slowly and half-blind, like the prisoner from Plato’s allegorical cave thrust into open sunlight for the first time.

“So, it appears that someone's hot for teacher,” Erwin said, mouth full as he walked up with a second muffin already half-eaten.

“Literally _do not_ talk to me.”

“Levi!”

“No, fuck off!” I snapped, shoving him out of the way and storming out the door, losing the protests behind me in the roar of traffic when I hit the sidewalk. New York City was not designed for socially-impaired nineteen-year-old boys knocked off balance by grad students with pretty eyes and smiles like a sunrise. I was claustrophobic and jittery by the time I got to the end of the block, lungs feeling like they were wrapped in wet cotton and hands clenched tight at my sides.

You walk home on the precipice of breaking, let yourself feel strong for managing to make it to your bedroom before you do because the only success you get is being able to hide your failures. It’s part of the pattern.

I was so riled up that I wasn’t even sure I could make it up Broadway without collapsing, brain humming like there was a beehive in my skull and tremors shooting up my spine. I thought about calling Erwin, seeing if he could pick me up and drive me back in the relative silence of his twice-owned Ford Fiesta, thought about it to the point that I pulled my phone out of my pocket with a shaking hand and flipped it open.

It was still on my New Contact screen, _Petra Ral_ behind a blinking cursor. A smiley face next to the letters.

I took a breath and made it home on my own. It felt like a little victory.

 


End file.
